Evening Brief: Friday, January 23, 2015

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The Ottawa Citizen’s Jordan Press reports that “Crown attorneys are lining up a wide range of senators – including some who have not previously been named in RCMP court documents – to be witnesses at the fraud trial of suspended Sen. Mike Duffy.” Some of the key senators in the Duffy drama who have either been warned they’ll be called as witnesses — or expect to be — are former government Senate leader Marjory LeBreton; Sen. David Tkachuk, former chairman of the internal economy committee; and Sen. George Furey, the committee’s deputy chairman. The Citizen has also learned that a small number of senators not named in the RCMP court documents – which outline the case police were building against Duffy – are to be subpoenaed because they were with Duffy at a public or private event that is the subject of one of the allegedly fraudulent expense claims.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper shook up his cabinet’s parliamentary secretaries today, tying up loose ends from Julian Fantino’s ouster and Erin O’Toole’s swearing-in as Veterans Affairs minister on January 5. In total, three parliamentary secretaries were shuffled. Parm Gill, who had been backing up Fantino, is moving over to Trade — a position that’s needed filling since O’Toole replaced Fantino. Pierre Lemieux, who was parliamentary secretary to the minister of Agriculture, will replace Gill on VA. Nova Scotia MP Gerald Keddy, who isn’t running again, is adding Agriculture to his existing responsibilities of National Revenue and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Frechette says Canadian foreign aid spending is set to plunge to record lows in the coming years, prompting pleas to the Harper government to halt the slide. A PBO report issued earlier this month “offers a contrast to the high-profile big-ticket aid projects touted by the Harper government, including its multi-billion-dollar commitment to the health of children and mothers in poor countries,” reports CP’s Mike Blanchfield. The report says that in the first six months of the last fiscal year, spending on poverty reduction shrunk by 23 per cent.

In Washington, the Keystone pipeline continued its divisive and quite possibly pointless trajectory through Congress. Here’s today’s Politico lead: “The new, freewheeling Senate of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell presided over an agitated debate on the Keystone XL pipeline that churned into Friday’s wee hours and ended with aggrieved Democrats crying Koch.” The rest is a rollicking window on the gristle-ier bits of sausage-making.

In Havana, U.S. diplomats hosted a private breakfast for seven of Cuba’s most prominent political dissidents today, sending a clear message on human rights a day after the Obama administration opened talks with the Cuban government aimed at normalizing relations. “The group was brought in a U.S. government van to the home of Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana,” reports The Washington Post, “to avoid Cuban security guards regularly stationed outside the walled mansion in an upscale residential neighbourhood.”

“Few modern political figures inspire the animus that Hillary Rodham Clinton generates, and the cottage industry that opposes her never really goes out of business,” writes the New York Times’ Amy Chozick. “But as Mrs. Clinton prepares for a likely presidential campaign in 2016, the sprawling network is evolving to attack her on new grounds.”